Clara Barton’s Work Shown in Civil War Find

The Civil War had ended and it would be another 15 years before the “Angel of the Battlefield” established the American Red Cross.

In between, famed war nurse Clara Barton ran a missing-soldiers operation that tracked down 22,000 men from 1865 to 1868, say federal historians who have now documented some of her work with the surprise discovery of records in a government attic.

“When the battle was over, she needed something to do,” said Gary Scott, National Park Service regional historian. “She would compile missing-soldiers lists and send them to post offices across the country to try to locate the soldiers.”

Scott uncovered one of the lists during the last few weeks while going through boxes of documents in the attic of a government building. Situated about halfway between the White House and the Capitol, the building once housed Barton’s Missing Persons Office. A worker for a contractor alerted the Park Service to the attic treasures, luckily before the building owned by the General Services Administration had undergone its scheduled demolition.

The discovery of a sign from Barton’s office first linked the documents to her operation.

“It was quite remarkable to us that this stuff came from the Civil War,” Scott said.

Government records, Civil War newspapers and leftover wallpaper remnants were among the items stowed in a sealed-off crawl space, Scott said. Even 19th century clothes, from embroidered slippers to a frock coat that “looked like something Abraham Lincoln would have worn,” were discovered. Some of the attic artifacts indicate the office may have been used as a residence, said Scott, who believes Barton may have lived in the building.

The unexpected find of the documents that languished for more than a century highlights a lesser-known period of Barton’s life and of post-Civil War efforts to heal the nation.

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Born in North Oxford, Mass., in 1821, Barton was a teacher and government worker before heading off to minister the wounds of soldiers, often on bloody battle sites.

Barton came into the missing-soldiers business when a prisoner of war brought her a list of dead soldiers from the legendary Andersonville Confederate prison camp in Georgia. Nearly 13,000 of 45,000 confined Union soldiers died from disease, filth, starvation and exposure there. Thanks to her work, Barton was able to return to Andersonville and mark the graves of thousands of soldiers. She later published a list of their names.

As head of the missing-persons office, Barton became the first woman to run a government bureau, receiving $15,000 in congressional appropriations and working with her own staff. The roster unearthed by Scott was marked “5” and contained hundreds of names of soldiers from the northern states.

Barton went on to establish the American Red Cross in 1881 and died in 1912.